Conference calls have many uses in our society. For example conference calls can be used by businesses to hold meetings with clients located in various parts of the country. A business owner located Maryland can conference with a potential customer in New York and a supplier located in California.
Conference calls can also be used for personal reasons. For example conference calling functionality may be used to provide family members located at different locations the ability to talk to each other as a group.
The ability to initiate conference calls may be provided as part of a particular telephone service, e.g., a Centrex service package or family communications service, or as a separate service.
Various conference call services are available that can establish a connection between multiple users. Normally an individual seeking to set up a conference call calls the conference call service, indicates the number of call participants and the time of the call. In such known services, at the time the individual sets up the conference call, the individual also provides billing information. This may be credit card information or, in some cases, a business account information. Once the necessary conference call set up information is obtained, the individual setting up the call is usually provided with a call-in number and a PIN. Conference call participants call the provided number at the time of the scheduled call, enter the PIN and are then placed into conference with each other.
After the conference call is completed, e.g., by the participants hanging-up their phones, the conference call is billed to the credit card or business account which was identified at the time the conference call was initially set up. This normally results in the charge for the conference call being reflected on a credit card bill or on a separate business account invoice.
Known conference call services of the type described above can be implemented using conference bridges or peripheral devices coupled directly to a telephone switch. In such known implementations, the telephone number called to setup a conference call and to participate in a conference call normally corresponds to that of the conference bridge or peripheral device used to provide the conference call service.
In order to provide new sources of revenue and provide needed or desired services to customers, telephone companies are increasingly relying on advanced intelligent network (AIN) functionality to provide services which include, among other things, conference calling functionality. Examples of such services include advanced call forwarding and/or call screening services where a call to a particular phone number may trigger calls to multiple phone numbers. As the call to each phone number is answered, the answering party may be placed into conference with the calling party. Such a service may be desirable, e.g., where individuals located at different locations are responsible for servicing a particular customer account.
While the above described billing techniques work satisfactorily in the case of pure conference calling services, such billing techniques are not very well suited for advanced telephone services which involve the automatic setup and establishment of conference calls, e.g., through the use of AIN functionality used in combination with a conference bridge or peripheral device with conference calling capabilities.
In the case of AIN based services, service control logic in a service control point (SCP) is often responsible for the automatic initiation of a conference call in response to activation of an AIN trigger set on a telephone service subscriber's line. In the case of such automatic conference call setup and establishment, there normally will be no call to setup and schedule the conference call during which billing information can be collected. Furthermore, in the case of advanced telephone services, it is often the called party who is the subscriber to the service. As part of the service it is often desirable to bill the service subscriber and not the call participants for the cost of the conference call.
From a convenience standpoint, it is often desirable to bill a service subscriber for services associated with a particular telephone number on a monthly basis. Telephone switches include functionality for generating a log of telephone services that are to be billed to a particular telephone number, i.e., a bill for the logged service is to be sent to a service subscriber associated with the telephone number to which a call or other telephony service is billed. Alternatively, it may be desirable to output billing information to a third party or other device in a manner which allows the billing information to be processed and billed to a service subscriber, e.g., on a monthly basis.
The lack of a conference call setup call in which billing information can be collected, the automated conference call initiation process and the potential for an unknown number of call participants at start of a conference call initiated as an advanced telephone service tend to complicate conference call billing operations.
In the cased of advanced telephone services, it often desirable to bill a conference call to a specific phone number associated with the service. For example, family or a business, which uses conference call services, may wish to receive their conference call bills as part of their monthly telephone billing statements. This way all telephone activity can be reviewed in a single bill corresponding to one or more phone numbers, rather than in separate bills.
In view of the above discussion, it can be appreciated that there is a need for new methods and apparatus for billing conference call services. The need is particularly noticeable in the case of AIN based services where a conference call may be automatically initiated as part of an advanced telephone service provided through the use of service control logic present in a SCP. Accordingly, there is a need for new conference call billing methods and apparatus. It is desirable that at least some of the new methods and/or apparatus be capable of determining the number of conference call participants or number of calls initiated as part of a conference call and the duration of the conference call. It is also desirable that at least some methods and apparatus allow the conference call to be billed automatically to a telephone number associated with the telephone service which includes conference call functionality. It is also desirable that at least some billing methods and apparatus allow for conference calls to be billed independently from a bill associated with other services associated with a particular telephone number thereby allowing for 3rd party billing and billing to credit cards. To allow for billing of AIN based conference call services, it is desirable that at least some billing methods be suitable for use in conjunction with AIN based services and the use of SCP logic to provide telephony services.